Prisoners can only work here if they have completed the Kitchen Safety and Hygiene Program which is taught by a cook in the kitchen. The cooks will not prepare any food while teaching. In Alpha 36 there is an event that causes the kitchen to catch fire, it is important to add sprinklers to your kitchen so you don't need to pay for the firefighters to come and extinguish the fire.

Beware when letting prisoners work in the Kitchen as prisoners can steal knives, forks, and spoons from the kitchen which can be used for digging, and murdering staff, and prisoners.

Using the above numbers and a policy of low quantity and no variety you can feed 80 prisoners with; 2 fridges, 4 cookers, 4 cooks, 1 serving table, 10 tables and 20 benches. In practice, however, you will want a higher variety and quantity to better satiate the needs of your prisoners. With high quantity, you will need three times as many fridges, cookers, cooks, and serving tables. With high variety, not all food slots will be able to be filled completely so you will need more fridges and serving tables even though they will not all be full.

Sinks are the most flexible item in the kitchen since the number you need can vary depending on how much time you have between meals. If you have a long time between meals a single sink can be used repeatedly to clean more trays over a longer period of time. If you have a short time between meals you will need more sinks to wash more trays over a shorter amount of time. As a very rough guideline, you could estimate you will need roughly half the number of sinks as you have cookers; but you can frequently get away with slightly less than this if you have enough time between meals to get all the trays done.

The number of cooks depends on distances to deliveries, staff room, serving tables, and between fridge and cookers. The number of cooks needed can be reduced if you have all of; prison labor assigned to the kitchen, prisoners who have completed the kitchen safety and hygiene program, and work regime in the hours immediately preceding eat time. Without any help from prisoners you will need a cook for each cooker. The variety of the food (none, low, medium, large) does not increase the portion size, but it does increase in efficiency slightly. While figuring out your kitchen it may be easier to set your meal variety to low and quantity to medium and make sure you can feed all of your prisoners twice a day. Adding variety and quantity will better satiate your prisoners and may give them the well fed status effect. Larger prisons may benefit from having a couple of extra cooks due to the long run times to the delivery area for more supplies and to get trays washed fast enough for the next meal service.

Since the maximum number of prisoners that can be assigned to a single room as workers is 20; the kitchen would need 240 squares to reach this. You could achieve this with a room shape of 12x20 or any variation which achieves 240 squares. If you want more prisoners than 20 to work as kitchen staff you will need to build additional kitchens. Staff cooks do not have a maximum per kitchen and you can hire as many regular staff cooks as you want regardless of kitchen size.

If you are building a kitchen with no prison labors, you can have it in any shape and size, as long as it can fit all the objects you wish to have in it.

With Medium Meal Quantity, 1 cooker is capable of providing food for 20 prisoners. On low 1 cooker will provide enough for 40 prisoners. On high 1 cooker will provide for 13.33 prisoners.

Each Serving Table can hold 80 servings, but only 40 trays. So you need 1 Serving table for 40 prisoners on low and medium quantity or 1 for 26 prisoners on high quantity.

A Kitchen can be placed outside of the area where prisoners are allowed or marked as staff only in the deployment overlay. This will greatly reduce the chance of prisoners stealing something. This will of course prevent prisoners from working or receiving instruction in the kitchen.

Cooks will start cooking four hours prior to eating time. With this in mind, prisoners can help cook with prison labour if work is scheduled on the four hours need to prepare food. If you do this, it is recommended to have metal detectors directly out of the kitchen's exit, since prisoners can easily steal forks, spoons, and even knives from the kitchen. You can also schedule work after the meal and prisoners will collect trays and wash then in the sink.

Cookers, fridges and sinks are non-solid so cooks can walk through them. This property can be used to maximize efficiency by placing the objects directly adjacent and in front of each other, with no gaps on the floor.

Contraband can be smuggled in food deliveries. As the deliveries get transported from the deliveries area to your kitchen it is beneficial to funnel them through a metal detector and past a dog, thus catching all metal and smelly contraband.

A relatively small kitchen can be used to feed a large, mixed population that shares the same canteen, i.e. minimum security and medium security prisoners. Giving the different populations a staggered eating regime will allow the cooks time to prepare meals for each population. For example, setting minimum security to be fed at 10 a.m., and medium security to be fed at 12 p.m. This can both reduce downtime for your cooks and allow different prisoner populations help feed each other.